How does zkEVM solve the scalability issue of Ethereum?
In this Polygon Podcast episode, Pavel Alpeyev is joined by David Schwartz, Co-Founder of Polygon ID and Brendan Farmer, Co-Founder of Polygon Zero to discuss what is zkEVM, how it scales Ethereum and more.
Read our notes below to learn more.
Basics of ZK
It is a cryptographic primitive like a building block or an operation that allows you to take some program and prove that given some input, the program executed correctly without actually downloading and going through other steps.
How ZK scales Ethereum
It is compressing a lot of transactions and executes them which avoids recomputing all programs in every validator.
The scalability is verification of computation which is called validity proofs.
Why zkEVM is hard
The scalability of Ethereum has been an issue for a long time.
It is replacing the model of verifying transactions where it accepts a small proof that a single operator is created from the computation of transactions.
zkEVM is difficult to attain because in a ZK environment, they’re natively working with finite field operations and programming with polynomials.
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zkEVM approach and compromises
The first approach is an entirely native ZK approach where you make no attempts to be compatible with Solidity or put their transactions.
The middle path is EVM compatibility where you try to get towards a more performant virtual machine for the ZK environment but you support compiling Solidity to that virtual machine.
There’s a fully EVM equivalent approach where you’re actually verifying the execution of the EVM which enables you to reuse the source code or tooling.
The zkEVM example of Polygon is a combination of different approaches and technologies that made it practical.
zkEVM success
The problem was up until recently, there were a lot of restrictions on the ZK proofs in general so they weren’t that performant and they had to rely on a trusted setup.
In the last 4 or 5 years, they’ve had interesting breakthroughs where they removed the requirement for trusted setup so they have ZK proofs that are transparent then seen an exponential increase in performance.
The team on Polygon Zero has been focused on accelerating ZK proofs for the last year and a half where they made a lot of progress in accelerating speed in making recursive proofs really efficient.
Instead of a single machine having to create a proof for a very big statement, they can now break the statement up into smaller components and prove them in parallel on different machines.
Polygon Hermez has started on April 2021.
They were able to accelerate the proof time 40x.
In Polygon ID, they also have a privacy based protocol and they are creating proofs in the mobile device.
ZK teams working together
There was a lot of armchair quarterbacking after the acquisitions were announced and the criticism was there are 3 teams working on the same thing.
Polygon Zero has demanded to work on R&D and proofing system improvements that can be reused across Polygon.
Polygon Miden is focused on applying Stark expertise but also building a ZK optimized VM.
David and his team have been focused on building the zkEVM.
The model they have internally is very optimal to have these different approaches that also address the next generation of this technology.
What sets Polygon zkEVM apart from the rest
Everything is open-source and transparent.
The current benchmark is a minute of proving time on an AWS machine that costs $7/hr for a 10 million gas block and they expect that it will continue to improve overtime.
EVM equivalence vs compatibility
Different types of zkEVM correspond to different levels of fidelity or equivalence to Ethereum.
The Vitalik approach was saying the more optimized you are in terms of ZK efficiency, you get better performance.
The user experience is key to have native scalability for Ethereum which is what they’re trying to do and what it is all about.
Evaluating zkEVM projects
Finality time is linked to the time to generate proofs.
The experience of finality is important in the blockchain from a user perspective.
Looking at the degree of EVM equivalence and the actual reproducible performance.
One of the interesting frameworks is security assumptions.
Future of Polygon zkEVM
The testnet will probably be upgraded next week including the new optimizations and recursion.
They will be launching the mainnet in Q1 2023.
They will be publishing security assumptions about the status of the network and model that the users are trusting.
Some upgrades will be happening this year to include a feature complete for Ethereum equivalence or strong optimizations in terms of performance.
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Navigating the waters of crypto is risky; even the biggest CEXs & stablecoins can have huge risks…
Act now, click the link below & become your own bank via self-custody.